On the heels of the fresh open-source AMD Linux driver tests with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2, here are some numbers for these Steam Linux games on the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) graphics driver.

While there is already an Intel Vulkan Linux graphics driver developed by Valve and LunarG that will be open-sourced as soon as the Vulkan specification is officially out, we haven't heard much about the other open-source Linux graphics drivers trying to get a jump start on Vulkan / SPIR-V support.

For developers that may be experienced with advanced C/C++ programming, dealing with graphics drivers is a very different beast, and thus for individuals wanting to get involved there are often lots of questions simply about how to get started.

Samuel Pitoiset has continued reverse-engineering NVIDIA's hardware performance counters and implementing them for use under Linux by the open-source Nouveau driver. His latest "RFC" patches are for exposing the NV50 global performance counters.

While the Nouveau developers remain blocked by NVIDIA on bringing up accelerated support for the GeForce GTX 900 series, with the forthcoming Linux 4.1 kernel there is initial GeForce GTX 750 "Maxwell" accelerated support out-of-the-box.

While the GeForce GTX 900 series are in garbage shape with the open-source driver, Nouveau on Linux 4.1 does bring some improvements for the original Maxwell GeForce GTX 750 series along with the GK20A Tegra K1 graphics processors.

While NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 900 series is dominating for Linux gamers with excellent performance with their $1000+ GPU as well as great Linux OpenGL/OpenCL performance out of their lower-cost GPUs with excellent power efficiency, that's only when using the proprietary driver... NVIDIA's newer GTX 900 / Maxwell hardware is less open-source friendly than their previous generations of hardware.

Nouveau (NVC0) Gallium3D now supports the GL_ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 extension. What's exciting about this enablement is that it's a feature for OpenGL 4.0 / GLSL 4.00 compliance and this Nouveau driver support is beating out the Intel and Radeon drivers in providing this OpenGL capability.

While the Nouveau pull request has yet to be issued for the DRM-Next merge window that will ultimately target the Linux 3.20 kernel, a look at the changes so far appear to mostly indicate this open-source NVIDIA driver is just going through a period of code cleaning and reorganization.

This weekend I got around to trying out the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 "Maxwell" graphics cards with the Linux 3.19 kernel now that there's initial support for these new GPUs via the open-source Nouveau DRM driver.

Samuel Pitoiset has been working hard to reverse-engineer NVIDIA's hardware performance counters of their GPU and to allow them to be taken to their full potential under the open-source Nouveau Linux graphics driver.

Roy Spliet, the student developer behind funded by the X.Org Foundation to work on Nouveau re-clocking, continues making great progress on this critical feature for the open-source NVIDIA graphics driver. With the latest patches, DDR2 / DDR3 / GDDR3 memory re-clocking should be working for a lot more NVIDIA graphics cards.

To the dismay of open-source fans, NVIDIA is tightening the belt so to speak around their GPU hardware: with Maxwell and future hardware, certain aspects of the NVIDIA graphics processor chip will only be available to the "Falcon" (a.k.a. "FUC") firmware images that have been signed by NVIDIA. While this will throw a wrench at Nouveau's open-source effort, NVIDIA at least informed Nouveau and are jointly working towards an adequate solution.

While the Maxwell-based GTX 900 series graphics cards are rumored to be launching in the weeks ahead, the GTX 750 Maxwell graphics cards on the open-source "Nouveau" Linux driver still need some more work before they'll play nicely when not using NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver.

Roy Spliet has been one of the few open-source developers working to tackle re-clocking support for Nouveau so that this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver can better perform. He's already published several sets of patches improving various bits of GPU re-clocking through this work that's being funded by the X.Org Foundation. Today he's published another patch series.

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